Conditions in the Confederate armies were probably worse
generally than those for the Union army but the statistics were apparently
destroyed in a fire in Richmond.9 As to civilian casualties from
disease during the Civil War, especially in the South where most of the
fighting occurred--no one seems to know.
In a well-written and moving book entitled Civil War
Medicine, the author Stewart Brooks wrote:
Surprising perhaps to the layman but not to the student
of history, disease was the great killer of the war. As one soldier wrote,
"These Big Battles is not as Bad as the fever." Of the Federal dead,
roughly three out of five died of disease, and of the Confederates,
perhaps two out of three. During the first year, a third of the Union army
was on sick call, and probably an even higher figure obtained South.
Intestinal infections, such as typhoid and "chronic diarrhea," and
"inflammation of the lungs" headed the list. Indeed, diarrhea and
dysentery became more vicious as the fighting progressed.10
A major cause of the high incidence of disease was the
failure to take hygiene and sanitation seriously. Prison camps were, of
course, terrible but apparently the camps where regular soldiers, i.e. not
prisoners, spent months in the field were not that much better.
Brooks gives us the following description of conditions in
the camps generally:
In the beginning, and to an unhealthy extent throughout
the war, the typical inductee on arriving in camp felt as free as a bird
and lived like one. Few recruits bothered to use the slit-trench latrines
(and those who did usually forgot to shovel dirt over the feces) and most
urinated just outside the tent--and after sundown, in the street. Garbage
was everywhere, rats abounded, and dead cats and dogs turned up in the
strangest places. The emanations of slaughtered cattle and kitchen offal
together with the noxious effluvia from the seething latrines and infested
tents produced an olfactory sensation which has yet to be duplicated in
the Western Hemisphere.
As for water--and seldom was there enough--any source
would do in the early camps. Frequently, it was so muddy and fetid the men
held their noses when they drank the stuff. In many instances, the heavy
rains washed fecal material directly into the supply with disastrous
consequences. However, in time, water came to be regarded generally as a
source of disease and attempts were made to secure wholesome supplies. The
better outfits even progressed to the point of boiling befouled
water--visibly befouled of course.
The United States Sanitary Commission was not long in
recognizing these deplorable conditions as a threat to the Cause and
dedicated itself to their eradication. By placing the matter squarely
before the public and military, it paved the way for the institution of
corrective measures relating to sanitation and hygiene. The Commission
insisted that the bulk of sickness stemmed from filthy army installations
and in no uncertain terms held the regimental brass responsible. Above
all, it carried through with its proposals and admonitions via
publications and workers and inspectors in the field. Nothing of such
force was operative among the Southern armies, nevertheless some
improvement was to be noted when conditions permitted. Although the camps
tended to improve, it is open to question whether the same can be said of
personal hygiene. The shortage of water and soap notwithstanding, this was
mainly a case of poor education, carelessness, ignorance or, perhaps more
to the point, the rural ways of the time. Among the officers, who usually
represented the aristocracy, the rate of sickness ran, one-half that of
the enlisted men. Again, the sickness rate for the Western theater--among
the men of the frontier--tended to run double that of the Eastern.
The salutary effects of good sanitation and hygiene are
severely compromised in the face of poor nutrition, and bad food was the
rule. . . .11
It is hardly a surprise that Americans know even less
about a foreign war, albeit one in which America had a major role, but where
Americans were generally far removed from the areas of greatest misery
except at the very end.
Those who moralize about the piles of dead at
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau should consider Andersonville where 7,712 men died
in six months out of an average of only 19,453 held. The Northern prison
camps were also terrible. The "average number" of Confederates held in
prisons by the North is 40,815 of whom 18,784 died.12 Only 252
Confederates held in Northern prisons died from wounds whereas 5,965 died
from diarrhea and dysentery.13
For the Mexican War (1846-48), the ratio of fatalities
from disease to fatalities from wounds is even worse. 1,549 were killed or
died from their wounds; 10,951 died of disease.14
During the Crimean War (1854-56), 12,604 men in the French
army died from wounds whereas 59,815 died from sickness. For the English,
4,602 died from wounds whereas 17,225 died from sickness. By contrast,
although 35,671 Russians died from wounds, only 37,454 died from sickness.15
Unfortunately, when war has ended, the misery of disease
and its full extent is quickly forgotten. Medals for diarrhea and fever will
not inspire new generations of young men to risk their lives for their
country.
Diarrhea and dysentery, as well as typhoid, are all spread
through contaminated water. Revisionists have generally not been aware of
the importance of water contamination except for typhoid. In reality, all
three of these diseases are extremely dangerous, especially in wartime when
large numbers of people often live in camps with primitive sanitation and
water supplies. During peacetime, one can afford the luxury of burial in
sealed caskets or perhaps even the kind of watertight "body bags" that were
used in the Vietnam War. However, in World War 2 this was a luxury which the
Germans could not afford as a rule, even for their own people. As a
preventive measure, the cremation of the dead was entirely appropriate to
protect against all three of these deadly diseases.
In addition, elaborate water purification measures were
employed at Birkenau, for example, where one can still see nine large water
treatment tanks within 200 yards of Kremas 2 and 3. The life-saving purpose
of these tanks is deliberately misrepresented by the Auschwitz Museum
authorities today by a nearby placard stating that these facilities were
"intended to produce driving gas from human excrements." The seriousness of
any such intent on the part of the Nazis is refuted by the absence of roofs
over these tanks either today or during the war as well as by the elaborate
internal structures for filtering and settling of solids within the tanks.
The bodies of men who have died or are near death from
diarrhea or dysentery do not look any different if they were in a German
concentration camp or in a Civil War prison camp or were part of a disease
ridden army under Grant or Lee or Napoleon. They are not a pleasant sight.
There are, unfortunately, relatively few pictures of sick soldiers from
before World War II but they are available if one searches, even for the
Civil War, and they are every bit as awful as anything from Bergen-Belsen.
Typhus
Typhus during the Civil War was apparently not the great
problem that it has been historically in Europe.
To get some idea as to the historical importance of
typhus, one should read Prinzing's Epidemics Resulting from Wars16
or some of the French or German works of the last century about Napoleon's
Russian campaign.
One discussion which is particularly meaningful for this
analysis is by Dr. Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who accompanied Kurt Gerstein to
Belzec and Treblinka in August of 1942. Pfannenstiel was Director of the
Institute for Hygiene at the University of Marburg an der Lahn and a major (Obersturmbannfuehrer)
in the SS. According to the "Statement of Kurt Gerstein," Pfannenstiel made
a speech while in Treblinka in which he said the staff had performed "a
great duty, a duty so useful and necessary" and "Looking at the bodies of
these Jews one understands the greatness of your good work!"
That Pfannenstiel made a speech complementing the staff at
Treblinka is hardly surprising. However, the meaning and content of his
speech in Treblinka was probably quite similar, to the speech he gave only a
year and a half later in Bremen on January 10, 1944 from which the following
is an excerpt.17
The accounts which we have about the spread of
pestilence as a result of the Napoleonic wars are shocking: Because of the
massive movements of troops through Germany, because of the quartering of
the troops in houses of the civilian population and because of the
economic consequences of the continental blockade, the groundwork after
1800 was especially well-prepared for the spread of epidemics. Russian
troop masses brought what was at the time called 'war-typhoid'--which
included paratyphoid, dysentery and similar diseases, but above all
typhus--to Eastern Germany. The French contaminated not only Western
Germany but all of Western Europe including Spain with 'war-typhoid.' Even
in Sweden there were terrible epidemics. Only England remained untouched
by the epidemics because of her position as an island.
The catastrophe which befell the army of Napoleon, which
had originally numbered 500,000 men, was completely sealed with
pestilence. During the initial advance, in one battle, four-fifths of the
men became casualties from disease. In Moscow, which was rich in
provisions, the soldiers recovered again. But then, after the burning of
Moscow when the 80,000 men of the French army had to return over the
infested military roads, they were almost totally wiped out from
dysentery, typhoid and typhus. In Smolensk, the number of troops who had
to remain behind from typhoid and dysentery rose to 15,000. In Wilna of
30,000 captured French troops, 25,000 had succumbed to disease. Among the
civilian population in Wilna at that time, 55,000 fatalities were reported
in half a year.
The massing of troops before Leipzig brought new heavy
outbreaks of epidemic. A report from Reils to Freiherr vom Stein describes
the terrible conditions which arose primarily from the lack of medical
care and military hospitals:
Leipzig, October 1813 -- Your Excellency has assigned me
to submit an account about my findings regarding the military hospitals
for the Allied armies on this side of the Elbe . . . I found approximately
20,000 wounded and sick warriors of all nations in Leipzig. The wildest
imagination could not invent so lurid a picture of misery as I found in
the reality before me . . . The wounded were lying either in gloomy dens
in which amphibians would not have found enough oxygen or in schools with
windows which had no glass and in high ceiling churches in which the chill
in the air increased proportionally as the foulness diminished . . .
In those places they lie in layers like so many tons of herring, all still
in the bloody garments in which they had been carried from the heat of
battle. Of the 20,000 wounded not a single one has a shirt, bedsheet,
blanket, cover, straw sack or bedstead. . . . Wounded who can not raise
themselves to an upright position must discharge feces and urine under
themselves and putrefy in their own excrement. For those who can get up,
open tubs are available but these overflow on all sides because they are
not carried outdoors. In Petri street there was one such tub next to
another which was used to deliver the midday soup. This neighborliness
between food and human wastes must certainly produce such nausea that it
can only be overcome by the fiercest hunger. The most hideous example of
this occurred at the clothing market. The loading platform was covered
with a row of such overflowing tubs whose stagnant contents were slowly
oozing over the steps. It was impossible to bring oneself through this
cascade of slops and force oneself to the entrance from the streetside . .
I close my account with the most horrible scene which
drove chills through my limbs and shattered my spirit. On the open field
of the public school, I found a mountain consisting of garbage and the
corpses of my compatriots. There they lay, naked and being eaten by dogs
and rats as if they had been lawbreakers and homicidal arsonists.
I appeal to your excellency's humanity and to your love
of my king and his people--help our brave ones, help soon, for every
wasted minute is an act of murder.
We do not wish to deny that in this war on the enemy's
side, for instance, in that hell which we inflicted upon the Poles in the
pocket of Kutno, conditions in the Polish emergency hospitals were not
very much different.
In all war until the middle of the 19th century,
fatalities from disease were on the average six times as high as those
inflicted by weapons. It was only in the War of 1870/71 that, for the first
time in world history, the number of fatalities from disease was smaller. It
was only half the total number killed. In the world war of 1914/18 the
fatalities from disease were only one-tenth the number killed by weapons.
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